Epistle from the 1985 World Gathering of Young Friends

Over 300 Young Friends from 34 countries, 57
yearly meetings, and 8 monthly meetings under the care of Friends World
Committee for Consultation, met at Guilford College, Greensboro, NC, July 19-27, 1985, to envisage the future of the Religious Society
of Friends and to see how their lives should speak within that vision.

We have come together from every continent, separated by language,
race, culture, ways we worship God, and beliefs about Christ and God...
We have been challenged, shaken up, at times even enraged, intimidated,
and offended by these differences in each other. We have grown from this
struggle and have felt the Holy Spirit in programmed worship, singing,
Bible study, open times of worship and sharing, and silent waiting upon
God.

Our differences are our richness, but also our problem. One of our
key differences is the different names we give our Inward Teacher. Some
of us name that Teacher Lord; others of us use the names Spirit, Inner
Light, Inward Christ or Jesus Christ. It is important to acknowledge
that these names involve more than language; they involve basic
differences in our understanding of who God is, and how God enters our
lives. We urge Friends to wrestle, as many of us have here, with the
conviction and experience of many Friends throughout our history that
this Inward Teacher is in fact Christ himself. We have been struck this
week, however, with the experience of being forced to recognize this
same God at work in others who call that Voice by different names, or
who understand differently who that Voice is.

We have often wondered whether there is anything Quakers today can
say as one. After much struggle we have discovered that we can proclaim
this: there is a living God at the centre of all, who is available to
each of us as a Present Teacher at the very heart of our lives. We seek
as people of God to be worthy vessels to deliver the Lord's transforming
word, to be prophets of joy who know from experience and can testify to
the world, as George Fox did, `that the Lord God is at work in this
thick night'. Our priority is to be receptive and responsive to the
life-giving Word of God, whether it comes through the written word - the
Scriptures, the Incarnate Word - Jesus Christ, the Corporate Word - as
discerned by the gathered meeting, or the Inward Word of God in our
hearts which is available to each of us who seek the Truth.

This can be made easier if we face the truth within ourselves,
embrace the pain, and lay down our differences before God for the Holy
Spirit to forgive, thus transforming us into instruments of healing.
This priority is not merely an abstract idea, but something we have
experienced powerfully at work among us this week.
Our five invited speakers presented vivid pictures of economic,
ecological and military crisis in this world today. We acknowledge that
these crises are in fact only a reflection of the great spiritual crisis
which underlies them all. Our peace testimony inspires us, yet we move
beyond it to challenge our world with the call for justice. We are
called to be peacemakers, not protestors.

It is our desire to work co-operatively on unifying these points. The
challenges of this time are almost too great to be faced, but we must
let our lives mirror what is written on our hearts - to be so full of
God's love that we can do no other than live out our corporate
testimonies to the world of honesty, simplicity, equality and peace,
whatever the consequences.

We pray for both the personal and inner strength as well as the
corporate strength of a shared calling/struggle that will empower us to
face all the trials that we will necessarily encounter. We have no
illusions about the fact that to truly live a Christian life in these
cataclysmic times means to live a life of great risk.

We call on Friends to rediscover our own roots in the vision and
lives of early Friends whose own transformed lives shook the unjust
social and economic structures of their day. They treasured the records
of God's encounters with humanity found in the Bible, and above all, the
life and teachings of Jesus Christ. And we call upon Friends across the
earth to heed the voice of God and let it send us out in truth and
power to rise to the immense challenge of our world today.

This Epistle has been published as Excerpt 29.17 in Britain Yearly Meeting'sFaith & Practice

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Quote that speaks to me

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their friendship. If absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this Divine Glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This
is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet
their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present,
because immortal. - William Penn, More Fruits of Solitude, 1702.

Note: This passage was quoted by J.K.Rowling as the epigraph of her novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

It is as a "religion of life" that Quakerism will be presented in the future and is being presented now.

Its distinguishing note will be its resolve to bring all this human life of ours under the transforming power of spiritual life.It
will stand out against all divisions and compartments that separate the
sacred from the secular, the sanctuary from the outward world of
nature, the sacrament from the days' common work, the clergy from the
laity.

It will tell of a Christian
experience that makes all life sacred and all days holy, all nature a
sanctuary, all work a sacrament, and gives to every man and woman in the
body fit place and service.Its concern will be to
multiply men and women who will have a message of power because they are
themselves the children of light.It will claim the whole
of man's life, and the whole of life, individual, social, national
international, for the dominion of the will of God.

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